Anth GR5555 From Ruins to Remains: Palestine & Archaeology
“The ruins of Gaza will be the archaeology of the future” (Iwaisi & Barghouth 2023)
This course reexamines the idea of “ruins” in Palestine, reframing them as “remains” - material, social, and cultural presences that persist despite efforts of erasure by colonial, national, or ideological forces. Students will explore how archaeology, often misrepresented as a quest for ‘discoveries’, is always deeply entangled with politics, nationalism, colonialism, and cultural appropriation in Southwest Asia. The course emphasizes ‘remains’ rather than ‘ruins’, drawing on Walter Benjamin’s idea of fragments as revitalized pieces of the past. It traces European imaginaries from the classical writings of Josephus and others, through the medieval Crusades, to the 17 th and 18 th centuries, when the depiction and representation of a romanticized past of ‘biblical’ landscapes was vividly created by European writers, artists and cartographers. These Orientalist perspectives were formalized in the 1870s with the region’s mapping by the British Survey of Western Palestine (1871-77) – a meticulous survey of the ‘biblical’ places in Palestine. The map that resulted from this survey was subsequently used as the basis for the partition plan by the British government which took over southern Palestine from the Ottoman administration in 1917 (the British Mandate), and was also used as the base map to create the political boundaries of the state of Israel, established in 1947/8, involving the displacement of 750 000 Palestinians from more than 400 villages across the region. The materiality of the Nakba remains across the landscapes of contemporary Palestine and Israel, standing as an evidential archive. We will consider how the notion of ‘remains’ articulates with settler colonial appropriation of archaeological narratives that seek to keep evidence for a Palestinian presence in the landscapes of the region firmly in the past – as ‘ruins’.
